Equality in sports? Women aren't there yet

Mike Beamish, Vancouver Sun03.02.2011

Last year, only two women appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. One was Brooklyn Decker, above, wife of tennis star Andy Roddick.Handout
/ Vancouver Sun

The other woman to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated last year was "America's Best Woman Skier Ever," Lindsay Vonn. She was pictured on the Olympic preview issue bent over in an improbable racing tuck, modeling her ski suit and other attributes, and freshly turned out by a makeup artist.Handout
/ Vancouver Sun

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The ranks of women as owners, trainers and jockeys at horse racing tracks are thin — so an Australian turf club decided to take a controversial approach to change that.

Copying a similar promotion at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, the Gold Coast Turf Club had up to 150 women, wearing bikinis and running shoes, gallop down the home stretch in a knockout format for a cash prize.

As Emily Wilding Davison has been dead for nearly a century, one can only imagine her response to the parody. Davison was forever memorialized as the British suffragette-martyr trampled under the King's horse at the running of the 1913 Epsom Derby. She later died of her injuries — after trying to pull down George V's steed — in the ultimate protest to win the vote for women.

Universal suffrage didn't arrive in the U.K. until 15 years later, however, a decade after all women over the age of 21 were given a voice and the right of choice in Canada.

As Canadians pause to celebrate or consider the implications of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, flash points in the march toward equality nonetheless remain. The women's athletic movement, in particular, still wrestles with issues of sexism, discrimination, under-representation in coaching and leadership positions, scant recognition and media coverage, even deep-seated hostility.

Last year, the only two women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated were Brooklyn Decker, wife of tennis star Andy Roddick, wearing a string bikini, and "America's Best Woman Skier Ever", Lindsay Vonn. She was pictured on the Olympic preview issue bent over in an improbable racing tuck, modeling her ski suit and other attributes, and freshly turned out by a make-up artist.

Insulting to women, suggests sports activist and writer Laura Robinson. Coupled with the fact that female ski jumpers had to petition the Supreme Court of Canada to be included in the 2010 Winter Olympics — their entry was denied — is evidence that the fight for equality is far from over.

"Why are we telling young girls they're equal, when they're not?" Robinson asks. "Vanoc [the organizing committee] should have said to the IOC, "We're sorry, but there'll be no ski jumping unless the women are included.' That's equality."

Strides and struggles

Women will come out fighting for the first time at the 2012 Olympics in London, 15 years after British boxing authorities claimed their menstrual cycles made them too "unstable" to box. The concern for women's reproductive systems and supposed frailty are time-honoured excuses that harken back to the 19th century and, apparently, still have dubious cachet today.

Gian Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, argued that his opposition to female ski jumpers was because the sport "seems not be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view."

History notes that Revelstoke's Isabel Coursier was the women's amateur ski jump champion in 1922, and the first acknowleged competition for women took place in Norway, 149 years ago.

According to International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, the IOC's goal is to move toward a "50-50" balance of men's and women's participation. Female athletes comprised 40.4 per cent of the national teams at the 2010 Winter Games, but 19 of the 82 countries represented had no female participants and the IOC leadership itself is still predominantly male.

Women account for only 16.6 per cent of leadership roles in the IOC's executive ranks, there has never been a female IOC president, nor is there a single female president among the various international winter sports federations.

"There are still a lot of challenges," admits Cathy Priestner-Allinger, a former Canadian Olympic medalist in speed skating and Vanoc's former VP of sport.

"It's still not as easy for girls as it is for boys. There are still social issues and peer pressure. Do you choose sports over boys and cheerleading? The challenge is to create the right environment. Because the opportunities are there. The support is there."

Canadian Interuniversity Sport, the governing body of collegiate sports, has moved toward parity, with 45 to 50 per cent of varsity teams now comprised of women. To achieve a balance, Carleton University in Ottawa eliminated its football program entirely. Nearby Ottawa U. chose to keep football, but there is no varsity male team counterpart to women's soccer, volleyball or rugby.

Still, the coaching ranks remain primarily a male preserve. Sheila Robertson, editor of the Canadian Journal for Women in Coaching, notes that while female athletes dominate the medal count in international sport, Canadian women are vastly under-represented in the ranks of high-performance coaches.

"Above all, we have to be supportive of sports organizations that want to see women get ahead," she says. "Women make up close to 50 per cent of our summer and winter Olympic teams, but somewhere around seven and 10 per cent of the coaches."

A popular notion is that being a great Canadian female athlete in the first half of the 20th century meant a woman would never get the attention she deserved, like being a member of the Negro Leagues in baseball. But playing to the social stereotype is to miss half of the story.

Canadian women produced a rich sporting history, long before the exploits of Hayley Wickenheiser, Cindy Klassen, Myriam Bedard, Nancy Greene and Barbara Ann Scott came to the fore.

Quebec's Louise Airmando? She was a star on the high-wheeler, or penny farthing, part of the first world cycling championship for women — at Madison Square Garden, in 1889.

Violet Summerhayes? She defeated the U.S. tennis champion in women's singles in 1899 and beat back all comers for six years following the turn of the century.

Lady Evelyn Grey? The daughter of Lord Earl Grey, the governor-general who bequeathed the Grey Cup to Canadian football, won the Canadian figure skating championship in 1911.

All of them are largely forgotten today.

"Most people think the women's sports movement began in the 1960s," says Ann Hall, a retired professor from the University of Alberta who is pre-eminent in the study of female sports history in Canada. "But, certainly, by the 1920s, women's sport in Canada was a growing concern."

The Edmonton Grads, Preston Rivulettes and Caledonia Indians, in basketball, hockey and softball, made the watching of women's sports not only compelling but commercially appealing in the Flapper Age.

The Grads were the acknowledged world champions. The Rivulettes, from present-day Cambridge, Ont., dominated the Dominion women's hockey championships in the 1930s. The Indians were not only female but aboriginal, and part of the explosion of interest in Canadian women's softball before the start of the Second World War.

Bobbie Rosenfeld, Ethel Catherwood, Ethel Smith and Myrtle Cook started the 1928 Olympics — the first time women were allowed to compete in track and field — with a bang.

Catherwood, known as Saskatoon Lil, won gold in the high jump. Rosenfeld and Smith took silver and bronze in the 100-metre dash and were one half of Canada's gold-medal, 4x100-metre relay team that set a world record.

No race for women longer than 200 metres was contested until the 1960 Olympics in Rome, however, after several competitors collapsed at the finish in the first running of the women's 800, even though exhausted male athletes did the same in the '28 Games.

It played into Avery Brundage's entrenched views on sexual equality and the physical inferiority of women. As president of the IOC from 1952-72, Brundage resisted all concessions to modernity and opposed distance races for women as "un-ladylike."

It wasn't until the 1984 Summer Games that women were finally allowed to run marathons — 18 years after Roberta Gibb hid behind a bush, then sneaked onto the course to become the first known woman to match men stride for stride in the arduous Boston Marathon.

Lack of recognition

If Gibb was ahead of her time, Alexandrine Gibb was a pivotal figure in hers.

"The inter-war period was a period of empowerment for Canadian women," says historian Hall, who refers to it to as "the golden age of sports."

Women began competing seriously and experimenting in events such as marathon swimming, in which they wind-milled alongside men for cash prizes. They were able to endure cold water better than men. So much for the frailty myth.

Athlete, administrator and sports advocate, Gibb believed women should and could control their own sports organizations and railed against the paternalistic attitudes of Montreal Star sports editor Elmer Ferguson or The Vancouver Sun's Andy Lytle, who maintained that hockey sticks, basketballs and relay batons did nothing to enhance the femininity and sex appeal of young women.

Gibb, assistant sports editor of the Toronto Star, and other female sportswriters of the time — Phyllis Griffiths of the Toronto Telegram, Shirley Boulton of the Winnipeg Tribune, Lillian Coo of the Winnipeg Free Press and Bobbie Rosenfeld of the Montreal Daily Herald — promoted female athleticism and covered the hundreds of factory teams that allowed young working women to play high-profile sport and still hold down a full-time job.

In the immediate post-war era, however, reactionary attitudes hardened, coverage of both men's and women's amateur events dropped off, and pro sports began to dominate coverage as it does today.

A study by the Women's Sport Foundation, based in East Meadow, N.Y., reports that 62.4 per cent of 2010 Olympic coverage by selected American newspapers, among them the New York Times, focused on male performances, compared with 37.4 per cent for women. Women, who took part in 47.7 per cent of the events, were treated more like "sex objects" in photos and given reduced prominence in story placement.

The report concluded, however, that overall newspaper coverage of female athletes is "improving" especially when compared with radio and TV.

In terms of year-round sports, ESPN's SportsCenter devotes less than two per cent (1.4) of its air time to the coverage of women, according to the WSF.

Books are another area of popular sports culture dominated by men and male role models. And it's not as if there aren't enough worthy female subjects and authors ready to tell their story

The Grads are Playing Tonight! — a sports history of the famed Edmonton basketball team that toured and conquered the world from 1915-1940, written by Ann Hall — is due for release later this year.

Queens of the Ice, by Carly Adams, a women's sports historian at the University of Lethbridge, went on sale March 1 and is pitched at a 12-year-old reading audience, so they can better understand Canada's robust history in female hockey.

"We forget that the foundation of women's hockey was built many years before the IIHF [International Ice Hockey Federation] finally sanctioned the sport in 1990," Adams says.

Hall and Adams were among a group of historians who gathered in Vancouver earlier this month to push for the belated inclusion of female athletes after a history of exclusion by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, which operates under Parks Canada. The board's mandate is to designate special places, people and events that have shaped the country.

"The usual form of commemoration is a bilingual plaque," says Lyle Dick, west coast historian for Parks Canada. "I think it's been acknowledged pretty well that we need to focus our efforts, in particular, in improving the representation of women and aboriginal athletes."

In fact, there are only three places where female athletes have been recognized nationally — Rosenfeld, in Toronto, near the CN Tower; distance swimmer Marilyn Bell, who crossed Lake Ontario in 1954, at the Toronto lakefront; and the Grads, near Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton.

Political correctness or the correcting of historic slights toward women, a few more bronze plaques are a tepid acknowledgement that Canada has some catching up to do.

mbeamish@vancouversun.com

Twitter: twitter.com/sixbeamers

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